r/whowouldwin • u/jamesbrotherson2 • 20h ago
Challenge If all of humanity mobilized to build a structure taller than Everest, could it be done?
We start at sea level, same population as we have currently on Earth, everyone just magically starts working towards the collective goal. Assume that there is some plot of land that fits these constraints. No competing interests, no dissidents. Whatever the best plan is, is the plan that everyone is adhering to.
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u/Nydus87 17h ago
Well, if you just had the entire population of earth quarrying and stacking stones, you could basically just make a new mountain. Does that count?
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u/TheShadowKick 16h ago
That would be a logistics nightmare that I'm not confident we could solve.
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u/Routinely-Sophie6502 14h ago edited 14h ago
8 billion people are willingly working on this as per OP's idea. Just have a management and oversight bodies that structure the work, use the best engineers, you would only need a few hundred thousands of people doing the intellectual work while all the rest can do manual labor and bringing all the machines and equipment of the entire earth. We could build a 9000 meter mountain in a few years. Think of all the buildings, streets, stations etc. in the world being built every day....
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u/TheShadowKick 13h ago
Throwing more people at the problem doesn't always make it easier. There's no way to coordinate "a few hundred thousands of people" doing the intellectual work. Militaries struggle to handle the logistics of a few million people, and they aren't trying to focus all the efforts of those people on one relatively small geographic location.
Look at the Manhattan Project. That was a monumental effort just to coordinate the work of a bit over one hundred thousand people, and only a few thousand of those were doing the intellectual work. I just don't think we have the organizational ability to coordinate on the scale of billions.
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u/TheHammer987 10h ago
That wasn't the effort because of how big it was.
It was an effort to keep it a fucking secret from the world
If you think militaries struggle to handle logistics, you are just showing you don't know anything about militaries or logistics. They don't struggle , it's literally what they exist for.
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u/Wise_Masterpiece_771 9h ago
I mean, coordinating the Manhattan project would have been a lot of work even if it wasn't secret, but that project was also a lot more complicated and intellectually demanding than delivering lots of bricks to a location and then stacking them.
Also, a lot of the intellectual/administrative work around projects is related to motivating people to do things, but under this scenario, the whole world is assumed to be motivated to do this.
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u/Wise_Masterpiece_771 10h ago
If we're not worried about making a useful structure the size of everest, but just a stack of bricks of that size, it wouldn't be that much intellectual or organizational work. On the assumption that there's some humanity-wide agreement that this was a good idea, it would be pretty easy, albeit expensive and time consuming.
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u/GoodFaithConverser 10h ago
Bro, it’s stacking rocks and dirt. I think we could figure it out, especially given everyone is a willing participant.
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u/myc-e-mouse 10h ago
You are forgetting wind. Especially at high altitudes
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u/Nydus87 3h ago
Yeah, but no more so than on top of the real Mt Everest. Hell, it doesn’t even have to be rock that you’re stacking. Just have everyone grab a big chunk of something, throw it on the pile, and it will evening compress and deform into something.
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u/myc-e-mouse 3h ago
The difference is how the peaks would form though. Uplift of solid rock is different then the loose debris humans will be carrying. Not to mention doing physical labor at altitude and wind if you do want to solidify the loose rocks?
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u/False-Amphibian786 17h ago edited 6h ago
Unquestionably.
The smart people would find a clever quick cheap way to do it - like simply having a long pole supported by balloons.
But even if it has to be a real structure - if the WHOLE world wanted to do it that is over 85.76 113 trillion U.S. dollars of world production... per year!
You can get ALOT done with tens of trillions of dollars. That includes simply building a pyramid style building of stone blocks. It may seem impossible but the world already mines 2.8 billion tons of material a year. Mount Everest only weights 162 billion metric tons. It would take a while but is totally doable.
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u/jnicholass 17h ago
Assuming that humanity is essentially bloodlusted into building this thing in this scenario, I think it’s pretty doable.
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u/Wise_Masterpiece_771 10h ago
How'd you come to that 85 trillion per year number?
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u/658016796 9h ago
The world's GDP is slightly bigger according to the IMF at 113,795,678 Million US dollars, so he may have gotten some outdated data. This is taken from this wiki page)
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u/Wise_Masterpiece_771 9h ago
Ah, right, of course. I thought they might have meant that as an estimate of the construction costs but that makes sense.
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u/Due_Permit8027 20h ago
Tower of Babel
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u/Logically_Insane 17h ago
Que?
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u/iSellNuds4RedditGold 12h ago
We already tried that and some fuckwit decided that we can't speak in the same language no more.
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u/Mr_Hotshot 17h ago
Would a space elevator count?
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u/jamesbrotherson2 17h ago
sure. If you think it's feasible
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u/Mr_Hotshot 17h ago
Well I think that’s feasible
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u/TheShadowKick 16h ago
With current or near future technology?
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u/Mekroval 14h ago
In theory yes, but in practice no. You would need to use carbon nanotubes, the only material with enough tensile strength to not rip itself apart. But you would need them in sufficient capable of forming a megastructure capable of extending from the surface to orbit..
And it would be the megastructure ever made -- by several orders of magnitude. Currently the longest we can produce is about 14cm! So ... a lot less.
So I think current materials science makes it possible but not practical for all intents and purposes.
Of course, if the world's scientific, economic and industrial output is concentrated exclusively on this problem, I think anything is possible. Humanity has done some crazy shit before. A space elevator is not completely off the table imo.
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u/Robot_Graffiti 14h ago
You need very long nanotubes, and currently we only have very short nanotubes. Weaving a rope out of 1 inch long nanotubes wouldn't be strong enough.
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u/Mekroval 14h ago
Yeah it would be a MASSIVE project to make this all work. Basically a Manhattan Project 2.0, but with a good percentage of humanity devoted full-time to figuring it out.
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u/GarethBaus 10h ago
We don't currently have the ability to create long enough strands of a material with a high enough strength to weight ratio to build a feasible space elevator.
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u/Echo__227 17h ago
Yeah.
The tallest buildings we have now are designed to meet many different criteria, like how to safely shuttle people to different floors, plumbing, etc.
If you just need a 30,000 foot structure, you just do something like make a bunch of hollow aluminum rods which connect as trusses, then form a giant pyramid.
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u/Sh00ter80 19h ago edited 19h ago
So this would be over 10x taller than the tallest building in the world. Jezuz. I don’t think we have the tech and special materials yet to make this possible. But if we had to do it bc aliens are going to detroy us in ten years if we don’t … maybe. But ten feels tight let’s say they give us fifteen. Yea i think we could, somehow, probably figure it out. I give us a 61% chance of having a stable something in 15 years, if we really, really had to.
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u/Ok-Kaleidoscope5627 12h ago
We can just build it out of the same stuff mount everest is made out of. We have lots and lots of stone. An entire planets worth. We just need to stack it up really high.
Humans already mine and excavate a lot of stone every year. We have the technology and equipment. With every human focused on this task, I think we could get it done in under 5 years. Especially if we did a hybrid structure where we just stacked stones as fast as possible and then topped it off with a radio mast style structure topped with a lighter than air structure.
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u/CosineDanger 19h ago
We use a bit more than a year's output of global aluminum and copper production, but we make an orbital ring.
What's an orbital ring? Earth gains a massive stationary hula hoop around the equator held up by the outwards centrifugal force of a second fast-spinning hula hoop inside it, or a continuous stream of pellets being deflected by a shit ton of electromagnets. It just hovers there menacingly like scifi set pieces often do.
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u/GarethBaus 10h ago
And since you can build it at any elevation where it is possible to orbit it should be possible to just run cables(made out of a high strength polymer like xylon) to the ground from it.
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u/Priest_of_Heathens 12h ago
I think this would actually be a bit easier than people are imagining. It doesn't have to be a skyscraper, a lattice structure like a radio tower would suffice. Build it with carbon fiber supported with cables along the entire length. It would probably be too much for a single cable to be that long, so realistically, you'd need to have a 6-mile tower anchored to three 4-mile towers anchored to 2-mile towers. It would be costly, but it could be done.
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u/GarethBaus 10h ago
It would be pretty doable, you might need a slightly wider base than the height of the tower and suits that are filled with compressed air for the workers at the top but the structure is feasible with enough resources.
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u/Somerandom1922 6h ago
Ok, worst case is a free-standing self-supporting structure. It'd be easier if it was supported by cables like large radio towers.
The biggest problem isn't compressive strength. It's resisting windshear.
This thing would need to be ridiculously wide, that would help with compressive strength too, but there would be such strong lateral forces that this would be the main focus (as it already is for ultra-tall buildings.
The other largest problem would be the actual construction. For the first few decades, we'd be building in ways we were already used to, but after a while it's reach a point where traditional methods of assembling skyscrapers start to fall apart.
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u/probable-degenerate 15h ago
If the only goal was to build a "structure" that gets up there then the easiest way to do it would be via a helium aerostat, connect it to a cable to the ground and you are technically done.
If that doesn't count then You would need a nations worth of resources to create the thing but it should be possible given current technology.
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u/DrFabulous0 11h ago
Undoubtedly. If it's a huge pile of garbage then we can get it done in no time.
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u/finest_kind77 10h ago
Not a chance. There’s no way that humanity could agree to it. Every nation would insist on doing it their way, and some nations would have a rift among themselves over it. Getting all of humanity together for anything is impossible
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u/Miller0700 5h ago
I know there's the "Tokyo Tower of Babel," which would be 10km (33,000ft) if completed. Excerpt from Wikipedia:
Would house roughly 30 million people and take 100–150 years to build. The cost would be around ¥3 quadrillion ($22 trillion).
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u/BROmanceNZ 13h ago
AI tells me it would take about 3.4 trillion dead bodies piled up to make a mound taller than Everest, based on the assumptions:
- Average person lying on their back is about 25cm high measuring from back to top of their chest
- Obviously we can’t just stack dead bodies perfectly one on top of the other, so..
- The number tries to account for how many dead bodies would likely be needed at its base to support a cone-like shape, then layering decreasing numbers of bodies on the base all the way to the tippy top
3.4 trillion is more than 400 times the current global population so there goes my idea of simply throwing people at the task until their lifeless carcasses stacked up higher than Everest.
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u/Volsnug 3h ago
I don’t think you understand the relationship between altitude and how tall something is. Mount Everest is the highest mountain (altitude), but is far from the tallest (distance from base to peak)
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u/jamesbrotherson2 3h ago
Yes, that’s clearly what I meant. Otherwise I wouldn’t mention sea level
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u/Volsnug 3h ago
It’s not clear lmao, you said taller, but included that it’s at sea level which is irrelevant
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u/jamesbrotherson2 3h ago
Bro ur being pedantic. Clearly I meant altitude. Otherwise I wouldn’t mention Everest or sea level
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u/DFMRCV 19h ago
How wide a structure does it have to be?
Cause if it can't just be a pole, then...
Grab some balloons and you could technically just make a really tall antennae...